Monday, January 6, 2025

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• Inclusive Research Tools webinar coming up February 6
• Jimmy Lin named 2024 Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics
• Test of the Emergency Notification System set for tomorrow
• Reminder: Senate nominations are open

Inclusive Research Tools webinar coming up February 6

A message from the Vice-President, Research and International.

A question that often comes to the Inclusive Research team from researchers is “what are the top three things I can do to embed EDI in my work?” In response, a virtual webinar on “Inclusive Research Tools: Identifying and Addressing Barriers” has been scheduled for Thursday, February 6, from 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. This session will help researchers identify ways to understand potential barriers that may exist in their research program, project and/or teams and will provide ideas for concrete actions to meaningfully address them.

Please register to receive the Zoom link to participate.

Hub feature

The Hub is a resource library of important documents focused on EDI and Indigenous research to support the UWaterloo community as they integrate EDI into their research designs and teams. The Hub was created as part of the Inclusive Research Team’s commitment to ongoing development and capacity building to support equitable and inclusive research practices.

This month’s feature is The EDI in Grants Workbook, a resource created by Senomi Solutions and the UWaterloo Inclusive Research Team to help researchers identify barriers to inclusion in their research teams and fields and how to address them. The workbook supports the writing of grant applications.

Upcoming webinars

• The Foundation: Building Inclusive Teams, Friday, March 7, 10:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m.  Register.
• What is GBA+ Anyway? An Introduction, Monday, March 24, 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m.. Register.
• The Decolonial “R’s” of Research: Principled Approaches to Engaging Indigenous Communities, Monday, April 28, 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. Register.

Resources 

• Inclusive Resource Hub
• Our website

For more information or questions, please reach out to research.equity@uwaterloo.ca or Indigenous.Research@uwaterloo.ca.

Jimmy Lin named 2024 Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics

By Joe Petrik. This article was originally published on Waterloo News.

Professor Jimmy Lin has been named a 2024 Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics in recognition of his significant contributions to question answering and information retrieval.

Established in 2011 by the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL fellowships are conferred annually to members whose contributions to the field have been extraordinary through their scientific and technical excellence, service to the association and the community, along with broader educational and outreach activities.

“Congratulations to Jimmy on being named a Fellow of ACL,” said Raouf Boutaba, University Professor and Director of the Cheriton School of Computer Science. “He is one of only nine computer scientists worldwide in 2024 and the first ever from the University of Waterloo to receive this distinction. This recognition also marks the third time Jimmy’s research in natural language processing and information retrieval has been honoured. He was named a 2022 Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery for his contributions to question answering, information retrieval, and natural language processing, as well as being inducted into the SIGIR Academy in 2023 for his significant, cumulative contributions to developing the field of information retrieval.”

About Professor Lin’s research

Professor Lin is a Cheriton Chair at Waterloo’s Cheriton School of Computer Science, a prestigious position held by senior researchers who conduct transformational work. He also serves as the Chief Scientist of Primal, a Waterloo-based company focused on building enterprise-grade AI solutions that exploit the best of what neural networks and knowledge graphs have to offer. Previously, he was the Chief Scientist of RSVP, a Waterloo-based startup that builds deep natural language understanding technologies to facilitate seamless dialogues between users and systems.

Since 2021, Professor Lin has been the co-director of the Waterloo Data and Artificial Intelligence Institute, which aims to promote cross-disciplinary research at the frontiers of artificial intelligence and its applications across all faculties at Waterloo.

For more than 25 years, Professor Lin has connected users with relevant information by exploring the intersection of natural language processing and information retrieval. In the mid-1990s, when he began working on question answering (QA) systems, these early technologies could already respond to natural language questions such as ‘When was Albert Einstein born?’ — instead of forcing users to sift through a bunch of links to find relevant information.

“With ChatGPT and other large language models, this is of course no big deal today,” Professor Lin says, “but these capabilities that we now take for granted can trace their intellectual lineage back several decades.”

Access to information is a fundamental human right, Professor Lin says. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations articulates that everyone has the right “to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” To this end, Professor Lin has devoted his career to developing technological capabilities, including search, question answering, summarization, recommendation, and other forms of information access, to promote these ideals.

Over the years, Professor Lin has worked on systems specifically designed for diverse populations, ranging from lay searchers of the web to specialists, including medical doctors, historians, and data scientists. More recently, his work has explored multilingual information access, focusing on low-resource languages that have received little attention from researchers, along with multimodal information access, enabling search across both text and images.

Beyond his research, Professor Lin tirelessly promotes the adoption of generative AI technology in all sectors of the economy, helping organizations realize its transformative potential. “The impact of large language models will be no less than the invention of the steam engine,” Professor Lin says. He is also passionate about AI literacy and equipping all citizens with the necessary skillset to navigate this emerging AI world, starting with K-12 education. While he expresses concerns about many aspects of AI deployments and endorses the necessity of safeguards, Professor Lin is optimistic about the future at the dawn of this new AI era.

Test of the Emergency Notification System set for tomorrow

On Tuesday, January 7, the emergency notification system (ENS) provided by Regroup will be tested on a campus-wide basis.

The test will include the following communications channels:

• SMS/text
• Email
• X (formerly Twitter)
• Regroup Mobile (safety app)
• Desktop Alert

Please ensure that you have:

1. downloaded Regroup Mobile to your device and follow the login and recommended settings steps,
2. ensured your cell phone number is up to date either in the app if you are staff, or in Quest if you are a student,
3. downloaded and installed the Desktop Alert tool onto your computer if your computer is not managed by the University.

If you have any questions about the upcoming test, or about how to make sure Regroup’s app and desktop alert are installed properly on your devices, email ens@uwaterloo.ca.

Reminder: Senate nominations are open

The Secretariat is reminding faculty and graduate students that Senate Nominations are now open, and all eligible faculty and students are encouraged to consider putting their name forward. To appear on the ballot, nominees must provide a brief statement (100 words maximum) along with a completed nomination form.

Faculty and graduate students interested in becoming a Senator can visit the Nominations and Elections website. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to email the Secretariat.